PSCRP-BESA Reports No 227 (August 31, 2026)
by Gershon Kogan
1. Introduction
In mid-August 2026, Iran’s First Vice President Mohammad-Reza Aref met in Tehran with Tajikistan’s Minister of Energy and Water Resources, Daler Juma. The substance of the meeting was unglamorous: oil bitumen and petrochemical exports, aviation fuel, a joint energy commission, and a first half of 2026 in which bilateral trade already ran some 15 percent ahead of the same period in 2025. Only after working through this ledger did Aref turn to something else — a proposal, in his words, to build on the “extensive cultural, civilizational, and linguistic commonalities” between the two countries by establishing a “Union of Persian-Speaking Countries and Regions,” and to pursue the idea “seriously” through further meetings and visits. (IRNA, 2026; Mehr News Agency, 2026)
It is worth being precise about what did, and did not, occur. No union was announced. Tajikistan did not agree to join one. No institution, charter, or secretariat exists. What exists is a proposal, advanced by a senior Iranian official and appended to a routine bilateral economic meeting — and, as this article will show, not for the first time.
That sequencing is itself significant. The cultural proposal did not occasion the meeting; the meeting created an opening for the cultural proposal. Understood this way, Aref’s remarks appear less as the launch of a coherent geopolitical project than as a rhetorical addition to an unrelated transaction — low-cost, low-commitment, and revealing precisely because it cost Tehran nothing to voice. The question this article poses is therefore not whether such a union will come into being; in any binding institutional form, it almost certainly will not. The more interesting question is why Iranian officials continue to reach for this particular idea, and what its persistent, low-cost recurrence suggests about a strategic problem Tehran has not yet resolved.
2. The Arithmetic of a Narrow Proposal
Taken at face value — a union defined by the Persian language — the arithmetic of Aref’s proposal is unforgiving. Its core membership would consist of Iran, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. Iran remains a significant regional power, but one degraded by war, sanctions, and domestic economic strain. Tajikistan is culturally central to any Persian project yet lacks the economic or political weight to anchor one. Afghanistan has a large Dari-speaking population, but its government — the Taliban — has maintained a historically difficult, at times openly hostile, relationship with Tehran. Set against the Organization of Turkic States, which already links Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan through transport corridors, coordinated diplomacy, and a growing institutional apparatus, a purely linguistic Persian union resembles a three-member club, two of whose members can scarcely sustain it.
Nor is the idea new. In February 2024, at a “Night of Iranian-Tajik Cultural Heritage” held at Niavaran Palace in Tehran, Ali Darabi — then deputy minister of Iran’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Tourism, and Handicrafts — advanced substantially the same proposal: a union of Persian-speaking countries, grounded in shared language, culture, and civilization. Darabi went further than Aref would two years later. Addressing Tajikistan’s deputy culture minister and ambassador, he described Tajikistan as pāre-ye tan-e Irān — “a torn-off piece of Iran’s body.” (ISNA, 2024; Mehr News Agency, 2024)
The phrase merits close attention. It is not a claim about shared literature or festivals; it is a claim about territory and belonging, voiced by a sitting Iranian official at a state-adjacent cultural occasion. It illustrates a structural tendency built into the linguistic framing of a “Persian union”: once the operative criterion becomes ancestry and language rather than shared heritage, the logic drifts toward irredentism — and toward precisely the kind of claim likely to alarm Dushanbe, Tashkent, and Baku rather than draw them closer.
The difficulty with Aref’s proposal, then, is not only its narrowness. It is that its underlying logic points in a genuinely destabilizing direction.
3. The Persianate Alternative
There is an alternative available, and Iranian officials have gestured toward it without ever quite naming it. Scholars of the region have long used a different concept for a different kind of space: the Persianate world. First articulated by the historian Marshall Hodgson and subsequently elaborated by scholars such as Nile Green and Richard Eaton, the term does not describe where Persian is spoken today. It describes the far larger zone in which, for centuries, Persian functioned as a language of literature, courtly culture, administration, and elite education — irrespective of what populations spoke at home or which polity governed them. (Hodgson, 1974; Green, 2019; Eaton, 2019) Isfahan, Herat, Bukhara, Samarkand, and Delhi were, in this sense, nodes within a single cultural system, even though most of their inhabitants were never ethnically Persian.
This shift in criterion substantially alters the map. Consider Central Asia. Uzbekistan today is unambiguously a Turkic-speaking state, and no serious analysis should suggest otherwise. Yet Samarkand and Bukhara — its two most historically consequential cities — served for centuries as centers of Persian literary and scholarly production. The case for a Persianate layer there requires no claim on Uzbek political allegiance; it requires only acknowledging a stratum of shared cultural history that predates, and outlasts, the modern linguistic border.
The Caucasus offers a more consequential case. Azerbaijan’s contemporary national identity rests substantially on Turkic language and orientation toward Turkey. Yet for much of its history the territory lay within Iranian political structures, and its classical elite culture was produced largely in Persian. More broadly, several of the Turkic dynasties that ruled portions of the Iranian plateau — the Safavids prominent among them — governed as patrons of Persian court culture rather than as its rivals. Turkic political authority and Persian civilizational prestige were not historically opposed; they frequently operated through the same institutions.
This is the argument available to Tehran, and it is considerably more sophisticated than anything in Aref’s current framing: not that Azerbaijanis are covertly Persian, but that their poetry, their cities, and their historical administrative traditions took shape within a civilizational space that Iran helped construct but never owned outright.
Nowruz offers the clearest instrument for making this case without provoking the territorial anxieties that language inevitably raises. Its most recent UNESCO inscription, joined by Mongolia in 2024, now covers thirteen states: Iran, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, India, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Mongolia. (UNESCO, 2024) No signatory is required to concede any ethnic or political claim by joining that list — which is precisely why it functions as an effective instrument of cultural diplomacy in a way that a “union of Persian speakers” cannot. A shared spring festival demands nothing of anyone. A union defined by language asks every participant to choose a side.
4. Turkey Within the Persianate World
The most striking implication of the Persianate framing is also the one Tehran has the strongest incentive to articulate explicitly: it does not exclude Turkey.
Regional commentary has already begun reading Aref’s proposal along these lines — as a Persian-speaking counterweight to the Organization of Turkic States. (Caspian Post, 2026) That framing is not wrong, but it is incomplete. If Iran’s proposal is understood primarily as a response to Turkic integration, Ankara becomes an adversary by definition. But under a civilizational rather than a present-day political framing, Turkey turns out to occupy a position partly inside the space Iran claims to represent. Ottoman court poetry developed in sustained dialogue with the Persian literary canon; Persian served for centuries as a prestige language of Ottoman elite education, alongside Arabic and Ottoman Turkish. The single most globally recognized figure of that shared canon, Jalal ad-Din Rumi — celebrated today, with justification, as part of Turkey’s own cultural heritage and buried in Konya — composed the overwhelming majority of his work in Persian. Turkey itself continues to observe Nowruz.
None of this diminishes Turkish identity or Ankara’s Turkic-world project; that is precisely what makes it a more effective rhetorical instrument than a rival ethnic claim would be. An assertion of the form “you are not truly Turkish” invites easy and confident rejection. An assertion of the form “your civilization, like ours, took shape within a shared Persianate space, long before either of our modern states existed” cannot be dismissed the same way, because it demands nothing be relinquished. It asks only that Turkey recognize the map it has spent two decades drawing was never monochrome.
This is the argument Iran has not yet made, notwithstanding ample historical resources to make it. Aref’s proposal does the opposite: by defining the project around who speaks Persian today, it hands Ankara precisely the clean, exclusive contrast that best serves Turkish interests — a small, impoverished Persian club set against a large, confident Turkic one. The apparent irony is that Tehran’s stronger asset was never linguistic exclusivity but cultural inclusiveness, deployable at Turkey’s own expense.
5. The Ceiling of the Shi’a Model
If a more persuasive civilizational alternative is available, the question follows why Tehran has not organized its strategy around it. The answer lies in what Iran actually chose to export after 1979.
The Islamic Republic’s foreign policy toolkit since the revolution has rested overwhelmingly on religious-ideological solidarity: revolutionary Shi’ism, the “Axis of Resistance,” and a narrative of opposition to the United States and Israel. This toolkit has produced durable results — footholds in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, cultivated over decades of investment in Shi’a communities and allied militias. It is not a toolkit that failed; it succeeded within a specific and bounded geography.
That geography does not extend into Central Asia. Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Afghanistan are overwhelmingly Sunni societies, as is Turkey. For these audiences, an ideology built on revolutionary Shi’a identity is not merely unpersuasive; in some contexts it is regarded with active suspicion, carrying associations with sectarian export that regional governments have every incentive to keep at arm’s length.
Analysis of the August meeting by SpecialEurasia captures this asymmetry precisely, framing Iran’s approach in Central Asia as pragmatic and non-ideological — built on trade, energy, transport, and cultural exchange — in explicit contrast to the ideological, resistance-based model Tehran pursues in the Levant. Tajikistan’s growing trade relationship with Iran — some $254.3 million in the first half of 2026 alone, up nearly 15 percent year-on-year, alongside Iranian-backed drone manufacturing on Tajik soil — illustrates a second, quieter track of Iranian influence in the region: transactional, security-oriented, and largely free of revolutionary rhetoric. (SpecialEurasia, 2026)
Cultural and civilizational appeals — Ferdowsi, Nowruz, the historical memory of Bukhara and Samarkand — carry none of the sectarian baggage attached to revolutionary Shi’ism. They ask nothing of a Sunni Central Asian state that Turkish or Turkic appeals do not equally ask.
The resulting picture is symmetrical: the identity that makes Iran a formidable actor along the Mediterranean coast is the same identity that constrains its reach across the Caspian and beyond. Tehran’s strength in the Middle East and its comparative weakness in Central Asia are not two separate phenomena; they are a single phenomenon observed from two directions.
6. Implications for Israel
For Israeli strategic analysis, this dispute over cultural framing might appear academic — a matter of competing historical claims among states over which Israel exercises no direct influence. It is not. It bears directly on how Israel ought to read the current map of regional power.
The prevailing framework has been straightforward and, for some time, serviceable: Iran constitutes the primary threat, while the Turkic world — Azerbaijan above all, and by extension a more accommodating orientation toward Ankara and Central Asia — has functioned as a natural counterweight. Baku has been a genuine security and energy partner; Turkey, notwithstanding periodic friction, has generally been treated as a state whose interests diverge sufficiently from Tehran’s to be useful. The logic of “the enemy of my enemy” performed real strategic work.
That framework is now under strain, for reasons unrelated to Iran’s cultural proposals and entirely related to Turkey’s own trajectory. Ankara is no longer simply a counterweight to Tehran; it is emerging as an independent center of regional power, with its own institutional architecture in the Organization of Turkic States, its own military reach into Syria and the South Caucasus, and its own ambitions that do not automatically align with Israeli interests merely by virtue of running contrary to Iran’s. A regional order organized around the principle that “whoever opposes Iran is aligned with us” was never a complete strategy; it functioned only so long as Iran remained the sole aspiring regional hegemon.
It no longer is. This is where Iran’s faltering attempt to construct a civilizational counter-pole — however unlikely to succeed in its present form — becomes relevant to Israeli policy in a manner its architects did not intend. A weak, contested, but genuinely existing Persianate pole of gravity, situated alongside an increasingly assertive Turkic one, does not by itself improve Iran’s record toward its adversaries. But it performs a function that unchecked Turkic ascendancy would not: it keeps the region’s cultural and political map plural rather than allowing a single project to define it.
This should not be read as an argument for rapprochement with the Islamic Republic. The regime in Tehran remains what it has been: a state sponsor of terrorism, an active threat to Israel, and a proliferation risk. The distinction that matters is between Iran as a civilization and the Islamic Republic as a regime; conflating the two, in either direction, produces poor policy. What Israeli strategy requires is not fewer adversaries but a clearer accounting of which adversary’s unconstrained rise would prove more consequential — and that calculation now requires monitoring Ankara’s civilizational ambitions as closely as Tehran’s.
7. Conclusion
Three outcomes appear plausible from this point. The most likely is that the proposal recedes quietly, as its 2024 predecessor did — a paragraph in a communiqué, a working group that never reconvenes. A second, marginally more durable possibility is a decorative institution: a cultural commission, a set of memoranda, without meaningful capacity to shape events. The third, and most consequential, is that Tehran abandons the framework of formal union-building altogether and instead invests, quietly and incrementally, in the underlying instruments — language institutes, joint heritage nominations, university exchanges, tourism — without ever declaring a union at all.
Any of these three outcomes leaves the same underlying dynamic in place. For four decades, the Islamic Republic constructed its foreign policy around what makes Iran part of a larger Islamic world. Confronted with a rising Turkic order it cannot out-compete on ideological terms, it may be discovering — tentatively, and without yet saying so plainly — what makes Iran a world of its own.
References
Caspian Post. “A Persian-Speaking Alliance Against the OTS? Why Iran is Reviving an Old Idea.” 2026.
Eaton, Richard M. India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765. Allen Lane, 2019.
Green, Nile, ed. The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca. University of California Press, 2019.
Hodgson, Marshall G. S. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Vol. 2. University of Chicago Press, 1974.
IRNA. “Iran’s VP Proposes Formation of Union of Persian-Speaking Countries, Regions.” 2026.
ISNA. اتحادیه کشورهای فارسیزبان تشکیل [“Formation of the ‘Union of Persian-Speaking Countries.’”] 2024.
Mehr News Agency. ضرورت تشکیل اتحادیه کشورهای فارسیزبان [“The Necessity of Forming the ‘Union of Persian-Speaking Countries.’”] 2024.
Mehr News Agency. “Iran Calls for Setting Up Persian-Speaking Communities: VP.” 2026.
SpecialEurasia. “Iran-Tajikistan and the Persian-Speaking Union Proposal.” 2026.
UNESCO. “International Day of Nowruz.” UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, Representative List, 2024.
Gershon Kogan, PhD, an Israel-based expert in Iranian politics, strategic culture, and Middle Eastern security. He contributes expert analysis to the media, and writes independently on Iranian and regional